Abstract
Resources are key to the operations of international organisations (IOs) such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM). As many IOs and their international bureaucracies cannot rely on obligatory state contributions alone, the overall availability of resources therefore ultimately depends on IO bureaucracies’ mobilisation of additional voluntary funding from states and other donors. Focusing on the resourcing of IOM, we analyse almost two decades (1999–2016) of donor contributions and country-level expenditures of the agency, comparing these figures with similar data for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Through our analysis, we find that the IOM does not respond to refugee numbers in the same way that UNHCR does, while both organisations are responsive in their expenditure patterns to other populations of concern. We also assess the extent to which geographical distance from key donors plays a role in where the organisations allocate their funding. Here, the IOM expenditures shift in line with donor interests to a much greater extent than for the UNHCR. Our findings suggest that the IOM serves distinct political and operational purposes, sustained by a highly earmarked and projectised funding model that distinguishes it from the UNHCR and other IOs.
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Notes
- 1.
Created alongside the League of Nations 100 years ago in 1919, the ILO was responsible for migration and refugee issues in the League of Nations system.
- 2.
The IOM’s earliest predecessors were the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME), later renamed the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), and then the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration (ICM), before becoming the IOM in 1989.
- 3.
Geographical distances were calculated based on Weidmann et al. (2010).
- 4.
See similar application in the context of the European Commission by Schneider and Tobin, 2013.
- 5.
These reports were downloaded through the UN Official Documents System (ODS) whenever possible and from the UN Digital Library for years not available through ODS. From 2010 onwards, the financial reports no longer contain country-level data, so we use data provided to the UN System Chief Executive Board for Coordination (UNSCEB) instead.
- 6.
See http://popstats.unhcr.org/en/overview for a detailed overview of the different categories and their definitions. Note that the UNHCR does not maintain data on the population that falls under the mandate of UNRWA.
- 7.
We have also used GDP per capita in our regression models, and the results are the same, which is unsurprising as we also controlled for population. However, as our interest is in measuring overall absorption capacity in a country, we prefer to use GDP in our main models.
- 8.
The Polity Score is one of the more common measures of how democratic governmental institutions are within a country. It is a composite index that ranks countries on a scale of −10 to +10, where −10 indicates a fully institutionalised autocracy and +10 indicates a fully institutionalised democracy (Marshall and Cole 2011). It includes all countries with populations greater than 500,000 in the most recent year.
- 9.
To give a sense of the magnitude of the effect, we can interpret the coefficient on refugees to indicate that a 10 per cent increase in refugee population is associated with an almost 6 per cent increase in UNHCR expenditures. The agency is similarly responsive to shifts for other populations of interest, with an almost identical substantive effect as that for refugees.
- 10.
Further information on the country activities of the IOM in both Haiti and Peru is available on the IOM country websites: https://haiti.iom.int/ and http://peru.iom.int/
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Acknowledgements
The research was supported by the project ‘Resource Mobilization in International Public Administration: Strategies for the Financing of International Public Policy’ (PI: Klaus H. Goetz), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Research Unit ‘International Public Administration’. Research assistance in the coding and analysis of the data was provided by Beatriz Garabosky and Salma Nosseir.
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Patz, R., Thorvaldsdottir, S. (2020). Drivers of Expenditure Allocation in the IOM: Refugees, Donors, and International Bureaucracy. In: Geiger, M., Pécoud, A. (eds) The International Organization for Migration. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32976-1_4
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